The Burden of Repetitive Tasks: Can You Automate Your Document Creation Lifecycle?

Whoever said repetition is the mother of skill never had to re-create the same clauses for a SoP over and over again. Let’s face it, having to draft new documents is a boring, mundane and time-consuming manual process. Besides, your enterprise already has hundreds, if not thousands of similar documentation in place – wouldn’t it be easier to just copy-paste the phrases and clauses you’d need?

Yes, and no. The process of copy-pasting could be just as manual and slow as the process of drafting documents from scratch. Think about it, first you’d need to locate the said document, then find which sections are applicable for your new draft and finally assemble the document based on your findings. The question is – isn’t there a third option? Yes, there is.

The DRY principal: Automating Document Assembly

The DRY principal stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself – if you can automate the repetition, why do it yourself?

Whether you’ll need to draft a new contract, standard operating procedure or simply reply to a frequently asked question from a customer, chances are somewhere in your content repository there is content that matches your need with 100% accuracy. This process is often referred to as automatic document generation and it has many advantages, the most important being that it saves you valuable time and effort and reduces mistakes.

Every organization, regardless of its size and profits, is always seeking new ways to save time and resources. By automating the creation of new documents, companies will be able to significantly reduce the time and resources spent in document assembly. After all, it is much quicker to click a button and produce a document than it is to find a similar one, open it in your editor, save a copy to the right location, and copy the information you need into that document.

Another major challenge when it comes to document assembly is the consequence of error. When you have multiple copies and versions of something, you create a situation in which you can easily propagate errors. Making matters worse, you might find an error and fix it in one location but not another.

Additionally, when you’re not automating document creation but copying fields from a database to a document manually, you run the risk of introducing human error. When this manual step is removed in favor of a computer-driven merge process, risk for error is eliminated in the data transfer stage.

How can you automate your document creation processes? Well, there are various solutions out there which can support your document assembly efforts, but Infinote has a different approach to the overall process.

Infinote enables you to turn your content repository into a library of searchable and reusable phrases and clauses. It brings structure to your unstructured content and allows you to locate phrases and clauses with 100% accuracy. Infinote’s powerful capabilities are integrated with Word and Outlook, thus allowing you to utilize a reusable library of corporately approved words and phrases in both document creation and emails.